[Page 304]

DENNIS to Mr. THOMSON, Who had procured him a Benefit Night.

1 REflecting on thy worth, methinks I find
2 Thy various Seasons in their author's mind.
3 Spring opes her blossoms, various as thy Muse,
4 And, like thy soft compassion, sheds her dews.
5 Summer's hot drought in thy expression glows,
6 And o'er each page a tawny ripeness throws.
7 Autumn's rich fruits th' instructed reader gains,
8 Who tastes the meaning purpose of thy strains.
9 Winter but that no semblance takes from thee:
10 That hoary season yields a type of me.
11 Shatter'd by time's bleak storms I withering lay,
12 Leafless, and whitening in a cold decay!
13 Yet shall my propless ivy, pale and bent,
14 Bless the short sunshine which thy pity lent.

Text

  • TEI/XML [chunk] (XML - 35K / ZIP - 4.5K) / ECPA schema (RNC - 357K / ZIP - 73K)
  • Plain text [excluding paratexts] (TXT - 696 / ZIP - 625 )

Facsimile (Source Edition)

(Page images digitized by the Eighteenth-Century Poetry Archive from a copy in the archive's library.)

Images

PDF

All Images (PDF - 751K)

About this text

Title (in Source Edition): DENNIS to Mr. THOMSON, Who had procured him a Benefit Night.
Themes: poetry; literature; writing; theatre; gratitude
Genres: heroic couplet; address
References: DMI 24507

Text view / Document view

Source edition

Dodsley, Robert, 1703-1764. A Collection of Poems in Six Volumes. By Several Hands. Vol. IV. London: printed by J. Hughs, for R. and J. Dodsley, 1763 [1st ed. 1758], p. 304. 6v.: music; 8⁰. (ESTC T131163; OTA K104099.004) (Page images digitized by the Eighteenth-Century Poetry Archive from a copy in the archive's library.)

Editorial principles

The text has been typographically modernized, but without any silent modernization of spelling, capitalization, or punctuation. The source of the text is given and all editorial interventions have been recorded in textual notes. Based on the electronic text originally produced by the TCP project, this ECPA text has been edited to conform to the recommendations found in Level 5 of the Best Practices for TEI in Libraries version 4.0.0.